“If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.” -- Carl Sagan

I indulged in my favorite time-wasting habit in a big way this weekend and previewed four (!!) games. This included my first major foray into the XBox360 Marketplace which turned out, much to my surprise, to be a positive experience.

Marketplace Games:

1. The Secret of Monkey Island SE

LucasArts upgraded the graphics, the interface, and added new voice acting to the original Secret of Monkey Island for the Xbox360. It’s Monkey Island! It’s a download from the Xbox Marketplace! It’s $4! How can you not download Monkey Island for $4? It’s MONKEY ISLAND! I am waving my hands around and doing the “go play it” dance.

It has an integrated hint system for the truly lazy who needs to get prodded in the right direction once a while. I thought the interface with using a controller rather than a mouse was a little strange to get used to at first but I did get the hang of it. I was totally consumed by this for an hour and change before Katie started getting real wiggly with me and we needed to get out the door. I cannot imagine anything that is a better buy at $4.

2. Castle Crashers

This totally adorable side-scrolling beat things up game is totally adorable. You can look at it here. You grab swords, you beat things up, you occasionally kill a boss, and the graphics are super amazingly cute. It also has 2-4 player cooperative and 2-4 player online multiplayer. It’s $6. We played through the demo level last night but haven’t bought the full game yet, though.

Real Games:

1. Street Fighter IV

I may or may not have ruined my left hand playing Street Fighter II many years ago… *shifty eyes*. I have played a huge number of fighters including variations on Street Fighter on consoles for years and the only game that has ever really pleased me is Soul Caliber II. (THE SOUL STILL BURNS.) This game comes very close: the game is stripped down to essential Street Fighter II-ness without all the silly crap accompanying fighters recently. The control scheme is very responsive and it is possible to play with a standard controller. Move list has been returned to the essential moves. Arcade play, two-player play, online competitive play, downloadable content, leaderboards, etc. It is an excellent fighter. The issue, of course, is that after playing for 2 hours on Saturday my hand still throbs, so I don’t know if I /can/ play it any more. The Dhalsim animations are awesome.

2. Star Ocean IV: The Last Hope

Star Ocean is a funny franchise from Square Enix because, unlike FF, all the games are set in a coherent and contiguous universe. However, I almost threw Star Ocean III across the room at the 70 hour mark. I go into IV with that in mind.

So far, the game has a compelling enough story to keep me playing for a little while. It’s a “prequel” which starts with Mankind’s first forays into the stars to find planets to colonize and inhabit. The combat is a real-time Tales of Symphonia-style action system that is RPG-like but allows you to mash some buttons to some effect which keeps the combat from seems too automated. However, I am only 4 hours in and these games usually fall over at the 10 hour mark so it needs another night of play. I don’t see any major glitches in the code or anything too stupid… yet.

Funny, I had a more positive overall experience with the Marketplace games than the very expensive DVD games. I suspect the future of video gaming is in the smaller, cheaper downloadables. Sure, they are not as whizz-bang full featured as the DVD games, but I am wondering if SFIV is worth $60 for the DVD. Best game of the weekend? Monkey Island, hand’s down.

Also, I’ve started a Fallout – 3 game, which I hope to get back to.

Added bonus — the web comics I currently read:

Dinosaur Comics, Diesel Sweeties, FreakAngels, Order of the Stick, Overcompensating, PartiallyClips, Penny Arcade, PHD Comics, Questionable Content, Sinfest, and XKCD. Cat and Girl and Wondermark both were added over the weekend. I’m still previewing the other comics people sent in that require me to read 2-3 years of backlog (*cough girl genius cough*). Winner of the most compelling comic is Digger, which is on the top of my review list.

Thanks to all who contributed to my addiction!

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About

Emily Dresner is the co-author of the Swords of the Serpentine RPG and author of the Dungonomics series on Critical Hits (and here).
In her spare time, she is also an expert in distributed systems and the Chief Technology Officer of Upside Business Travel.
The big About Me page is here.